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DISUNION: 



TWO DISCOURSES AT MUSIC HALL 



On January 20th, and February 17th, 1861. 



BT 



WENDELL PHILLIPS. 



"If the sovereignty of the Union were to engage in a struggle with that of the 
States at the present day, its defeat may be confidently predicted; and it is not 
p obable that Lh a struggle would be seriously undertaken As often as steady 
resistance is offered to the Federal Government, it will be found to yield. Experi- 
ence has shown that whenever a State has demanded any thing with perseverance 
Ld resolution, it has invariably succeeded; and that if a separate Government has 
distinctly refused to act, it was left to do as it thought fit.»-D* Toco^villb, 
in 1834. 




BOSTON: 
PUBLISHED BY ROBERT F. WALLCUT, 

No. 221 WASHINGTON STREET, 
1861. 



£440 

. 5" 



THE LESSON OF THE HOUR. 



The office of the pulpit is to teach men their duty. 
"Wherever men's thoughts influence their laws, it is the duty 
of the pulpit to preach politics. If it were possible to con- 
ceive of a community whose opinions had no influence on 
their government, there the pulpit would have no occasion 
to talk of government. I never heard or knew of such a 
community. Though sheltered by Roman despotism, Herod 
and the chief priests abstained from this and that because 
they " feared the people." The Sultan dared to murder his 
Janissaries only when the streets came to hate them as much 
as he did. The Czar, at the head of a government whose 
constitution knows no check, but poison and the dagger, yet 
feels the pressure of public opinion. Certainly, where pews 
are full of voters, no question but the sermon should be full 
of politics. 

" The Lord reigneth ; let the earth rejoice." " The Cov- 
enant with Death" is annulled; "the Agreement with 
Hell " is broken to pieces. The chain which has held the 
slave system since 1787 is parted. Thirty years ago, South- 
ern leaders, sixteen years ago, Northern Abolitionists, an- 
nounced their purpose to seek the dissolution of the Amer- 
ican Union. Who dreamed that success would come so 
soon? South Carolina, bankrupt, alone, with a hundred 
thousand more slaves than whites, four blacks to three whites, 
within her borders, flings her gauntlet at the feet of twenty- 
five millions of people in defence of an idea, to maintain 
what she thinks her right. I would New England could 
count one State as fearless among her six ! Call it not the 
madness of an engineer who stands in front of his cannon at 
the moment of discharge ; — call it rather the forlorn hope 
of the mariner, seizing plank or spar in the fury of the storm. 



4 THE LESSON OF THE HOUR. 

The mistake of South Carolina is, she fancies there is more 
chance of saving slavery outside of the Union than inside. 
Three States have followed her example. Probably the 
rest of the Slave States, or many of them, will find them- 
selves unable to resist the infection, and then the whole 
merciless conspiracy of 1787 is ended, and timid men will 
dare to hate slavery without trembling for bread or life. 

Let us look at the country — the North, the South, and 
the Government. The South divided into three sections : 
1st, Those who hold slaves exactly as they do bank-stock or 
land — and of course love the Union, which enables them to 
treat man as property — timid wealth shrinking from change, 
but so timid as to stand dumb. 2d, Those who have ruled 
the nation sixty years, monopolizing Presidents' chairs and 
embassies ; defeated now, these plan, in earnest sincerity, for 
another nation with presidencies and embassies all to them- 
selves. 3d, A class made up from these two, who cling to 
the Union in their hearts, but threaten loudly, well knowing 
the loudest threats get the best bargain. 

The object of the South is a separate confederacy, hop- 
ing they can stand long enough for the North to ask for an- 
nexation on their terms. 

Then comes the Government, so-called — in reality a con- 
spiracy against justice and honest men ; some of its mem- 
bers pilferers and some traitors — the rest pilferers and trai- 
tors too. Like all outgoing administrations, they have no 
wish to lessen the troubles of their successors by curing the 
nation's hurt — rather aggravate it. They have done all 
the mischief in their power, and long now only to hear the 
clock strike twelve on the 4th day of March. 

Then look at the North, divided into three sections. 1st, 
The defeated minority, glad of any thing that troubles their 
conquerors. 2d, The class of Republicans led by Seward, 
offering to surrender any thing to save the Union. (Ap- 
plause.) Their gospel is the Constitution (applause), and 
the slave clause is their sermon on the mount. (Laughter 
and applause.) They think that at the judgment-day, the 
blacker the sins they have committed to save the Union, the 
clearer will be their title to heaven. 3d, The rest of the 
Republicans, led by the Tribune, — all honor to the Tribune, 
faithful and true ! — who consider their honor pledged to 
fulfil in office the promises made in the canvass. Their 



THE LESSON OF THE HOUR. O 

motto is : " The Chicago platform, every inch of it ; not a 
hair's-breadth of the territories shall be surrendered to slav- 
ery." (Applause.) But they, too, claim the cannon's mouth 
to protect forts, defend the flag, and save the Union. At the 
head of this section, we have every reason to believe, stands 
Mr. Abraham Lincoln. 

All these are the actors on the stage. But the foundation 
on which all stand divides only into two parts : those who 
like slavery and mean it shall last — those who hate it and 
mean it shall die. In the boiling gulf goes on the perpetual 
conflict of acid and alkali ; all these classes are but bubbles 
on the surface. The upper millstone is right, and the lower 
wrong. Between them, governments and parchments, par- 
ties and compromises, are being slowly ground to powder. 

Broadly stated, the South plans a Southern Confederacy 
to uphold slavery — the North clings to the Union to uphold 
trade and secure growth. Without the Union, Mr. Seward 
tells us we can neither be safe, rich, strong, nor happy. We 
used to think justice was before thrift, and nobleness better 
than happiness. I place no great reliance on that prudent 
patriotism which is the child of interest. The Tribune, un- 
usually frank, pre-eminently honorable and lofty as has been 
its tone of late, still says, " Be it the business of the people 
everywhere to forget the negro, and remember only the 
country." (Applause.) 

After drifting, a dreary night of thirty years, before the 
hurricane, our ship of State is going to pieces on the lee 
shore of slavery. Every one confesses that the poison of 
our body politic is slavery. European critics, in view of it, 
have pronounced the existence of the Union hitherto a " for- 
tunate accident." Orators floated into fame on one inspired 
phrase, " irrepressible conflict." Jefferson died foreseeing 
that this was the rock on which we should split. Even Mr. 
Webster, speaking with bated breath, in the cold chill of 
1850, still dared to be a statesman, and offered to meet the 
South on this question, suggesting a broad plan for the cure 
of our dread disease. But now, with the Union dropping 
asunder, with every brain and tongue active, we have yet to 
hear the first statesman word, the first proposal to consider 
the fountain and origin of all our ills. We look in vain 
through Mr. Seward's speech for one hint or suggestion as 
to any method of dealing with our terrible hurt. Indeed, 
1* 



6 THE LESSON OP THE HOUR. 

one of his terrors of disunion is, that it will give room for 
"an European, an uncompromising hostility to slavery." 
Such an hostility — the irrepressible conflict of right and 
wrong — William H. Seward, in 1861, pronounces "fearful" ! 
To describe the great conflict of the age, the first of Amer- 
ican statesmen, in the year of Garibaldi and Italy, can find 
no epithet but " fearful." 

The servile silence of the 7th of March, 1850, is outdone, 
and, to New York, Massachusetts yields the post of infamy 
which her great Senator has hitherto filled. Yes, of all the 
doctors bending over the patient, not one dares to name his 
disease, except the Tribune, which advises him to forget it ! 
Throughout half of the great cities of the North, every one 
who touches on it is mobbed into silence ! This is, indeed, 
the saddest feature of our times. 

Let us, then, who, unlike Mr. Seward, are not afraid to 
tell, even now, all and just what we wish — let us look at 
the real nature of the crisis in which we stand. The Tri- 
bune says we should "forget the negro." It seems to me 
that all our past, all our present, and all our future com- 
mand us at this moment to think of nothing but the nesTO. 
(Slight laughter derisively.) 

Let me tell you why. Mr. Seward says, " The first object 
of every human society is safety ; " I think the first duty of 
society is justice. Alexander Hamilton said, " Justice is 
the end of government. It is the end of civil society." If 
any other basis of safety or gain were honest, it would be 
impossible. " A prosperous iniquity," says Jeremy Taylor, 
"is the most unprofitable condition in the world." The na- 
tion which, in moments when great moral questions disturb 
its peace, consults first for its own safety, is atheist and cow- 
ard, and there are three chances out of four that it will end 
by being knave. We were not sent into the world to plant 
cities, to make Unions or save them. Seeing that all men 
are born equal, our first civil duty is to see that our laws 
treat them so. The convulsion of this hour is the effort of 
the nation to do this, its duty, while politicians and parties 
strive to balk it of its purpose. The nation agonizes this 
aour to recognize man as man, forgetting the color, condi- 
tion, sex, and creed. 

Our Revolution earned us only independence. Whatever 
our fathers meant, the chief lesson of that hour was that 



THE LESSON OF THE HOUR. 7 

America belongs to Americans. That generation learned it 
thoroughly ; the second inherited it as a prejudice ; we, the 
third, have our bones and blood made of it. When thought 
passes through purpose into character, it becomes the un- 
changeable basis of national life. That Revolutionary les- 
son need never be learned again, and will never die out. 
Let a British fleet, with admirals of the blue and red, cover 
our Atlantic coast, and in ten days, Massachusetts and Caro- 
lina will stand shoulder to shoulder, the only rivalry, who 
shall die nearest the foe. (Loud applause, with cries of 
" Good.") 

That principle is all our Revolution directly taught us. 
Massachusetts was hide-bound in the aristocracy of classes 
for years after. The bar and the orthodox pulpit were our 
House of Lords. A Baptist clergyman Avas little better 
than a negro. The five points of Massachusetts decency 
were, to trace your lineage to the Mayflower, graduate at 
Harvard College, be a good lawyer or a member of an 
orthodox church, — either would answer (laughter), — pay 
your debts, and frighten your child to sleep by saying 
" Thomas Jefferson." Our theological aristocracy went 
down before the stalwart blows of Baptist, Unitarian, and 
Freethinker — before Channing and Abner Kneeland. 
Virginia slaveholders, making theoretical democracy their 
passion, conquered the Federal Government, and emanci- 
pated the working classes of New England. Bitter was the 
cup to honest Federalism aud the Essex junto. To-day, 
Massachusetts only holds to the lips of Carolina a beaker 
of the same beverage. I know no man who has ana- 
lyzed this passage in our history so well as Richard Hil- 
dreth. The last thirty years have been the flowering out of 
this lesson. The Democratic principle, crumbling classes 
into men, has been working down from pulpits and judges' 
seats, through shop-boards and shoe-benches, to Irish hod- 
men, and reached the negro at last. The long toil of a 
century cries out "Eureka!" — I have found it ! — the dia- 
mond of an immortal soul and an equal manhood under a 
black skin as truly as under a white one. For this, Leggett 
labored and Lovejoy died. For this, the bravest soul of the 
century went up to God from a Virginia scaffold. (Hisses 
and applause.) For this, young men gave up their May of 
youth, and old men the honors and ease of age. It went 



8 THE LESSON OF THE HOUR. 

through the land writing history afresh, setting up and pull- 
ing clown parties, riving sects, mowing down colossal reputa- 
tions, making us veil our faces in shame at the baseness of 
our youth's idols, sending bankrupt statesmen to dishonored 
graves. 

We stand to-day just as Hancock and Adams and Jeffer- 
son stood, when stamp act and tea tax, Patrick Henry's elo- 
quence and the massacre of March 5th, Otis' blood and 
Bunker Hill, had borne them to July, 1776. Suppose at 
that moment John Adams had cried out, " Now let the peo- 
ple everywhere forget Independence, and remember only 
' God save the King'!" (Laughter.) The toil of a whole 
generation — thirty years — has been spent in examining this 
question of the rights and place of the negro ; the whole 
earnest thought of the nation given to it ; old parties have 
been worked against it, new ones grown out of it ; it stifles 
all other questions ; the great interests of the nation neces- 
sarily suffer, men refusing to think of any thing but this ; 
it struggles up through all compromises, asserting its right 
to be heard ; no green withes of eloquence or cunning, trade, 
pulpit, Congress, or college, succeed in binding this Sam- 
son ; the business of the seaboard begs it may be settled, no 
matter how ; the whole South is determined to have it met, 
proclaiming that it does not secede because of Personal 
Liberty Laws or a Republican President, but because of 
the state of Northern feeling of which these are signs. It 
is not Northern laws or officers they fear, but Northern con- 
science. Why, then, should not the North accept the issue, 
and try to settle the question forever ? You may run the 
Missouri line to the Pacific, but Garrison still lives; and 
while he does, South Carolina hates and fears Massachu- 
setts. (Applause.) No congressional resolves can still our 
brains or stifle our hearts ; till you do, the slaveholder feels 
that New England is his natural foe. There can therefore 
be no real peace till we settle the slave question. If thirty 
years of debate have not fitted us to meet it, when shall we 
be able? 

But the most honest Republicans say a State has no right 
to secede ; we will show first that we have a government, 
and then, not before, settle disputed questions. Suppose a 
State has no right to secede, of what consequence is that ? 
A Union is made up of willing States, not of conquered 



THE LESSON OF THE HOUR. 9 

provinces. There are some rights, quite perfect, yet wholly 
incapable of being enforced. A husband or wife who can 
only keep the other partner within the bond by locking the 
doors and standing armed before them, had better submit to 
peaceable separation. (Applause.) A firm where one 
partner refuses to act, has a full right to his services, but 
how compel them ? South Carolina may be punished for 
her fault in going out of the Union, but that does not keep 
her in it. Why not recognize soberly the nature and neces- 
sity of our position? Why not, like statesmen, remember 
that homogeneous nations, like France, tend to centralization ; 
confederacies, like ours, tend inevitably to dismember- 
ment ? France is the slow, still deposit of ages on central 
granite ; only the globe's convulsion can rive it ! We are 
the rich mud of the Mississippi ; every flood shifts it from 
one side to the other of the channel. Nations, like Austria, 
victim States, held under the lock and key of despotism, — 
or like ourselves, a herd of States, hunting for their food 
together, — must expect that any quarrel may lead to dis- 
union. Beside, Inter arma, silent leges — Armies care 
nothing for constables. This is not a case at law, but rev- 
olution. 

Let us not, however, too anxiously grieve over the Union 
of 1787. Real Unions are not made, they grow. This 
was made, like an artificial waterfall or a Connecticut nut- 
meg. It was not an oak which to-day a tempest shatters. 
It was a wall hastily built, in hard times, of round boulders ; 
the cement has crumbled, and the smooth stones, obeying 
the law of gravity, tumble here and there. Why should 
we seek to stop them, merely to show that we have a right 
and can ? That were only a waste of means and temper. 
Let us build, like the pyramids, a fabric which every natural 
law guarantees ; or, better still, plant a Union whose life 
survives the ages, and quietly gives birth to its successor. 

Mr. Seward's last speech, which he confesses does not 
express his real convictions, denies every principle, but one, 
that he proclaimed in his campaign addresses ; that one — 
which, at Lansing, he expressly said " he was ashamed to 
confess " — that one is this : Every thing is to be sacrificed 
to save the Union. I am not aware that, on any public oc- 
casion, varied and wide as have been his discussions and 
topics, he has ever named the truth or the virtue which he 



10 THE LESSON OF THE HOUR. 

would not sacrifice to save the Union. For thirty years, 
there has been stormy and searching discussion of profound 
moral questions ; one, whom his friends call our only states- 
man, has spoken often on all ; yet he has never named the 
sin which he does not think its saving of the Union would 
not change into a virtue. 

Remembering this element of his statesmanship, let us 
listen to the key-note of his late speech : " The first object 
of every human society is safety or security, for which, if 
need be, they will and they must sacrifice every other." 

I will not stop to say that, even with his explanation, his 
principle is equivocal, and, if unlimited, false ; that, unqual- 
ified, it jusiuies every crime, and would have prevented 
*»very glory of history ; that by it, James II. and Bonaparte 
were saints ; under one sense, the Pilgrims were madmen, 
and under another, the Puritans did right to hang Quakers. 
But grant it. Suppose the Union means wealth, culture, 
happiness, and safety, man has no right to buy either by 
crime. 

Many years ago, on the floor of Congress, Kentucky and 
Tennessee both confessed that "the dissolution of the Union 
was the dissolution of slavery.' , Last month, Senator John- 
son of Tennessee said, "If I were an abolitionist, and wanted 
to accomplish the abolition of slavery in the Southern States, 
the first step I would take would be to break the bonds of 
this Union. I believe the continuance of slavery depends on 
the preservation of this Union, and a compliance with all the 
guarantees of the Constitution." In September last (at La- 
Crosse) Mr. Seward himself said, "What are they [the South- 
ern States] in for, but to have slavery saved for them by 
the Federal Union ? Why would they go out, for they could 
not maintain and defend themselves against their own slaves?" 
In this last speech, he tells us it is the Union which restricts 
the opposition to slavery within narrow limits, and prevents 
it from being, like that of Europe, a " direct and uncompro- 
mising" demand for abolition. 

Now, if the Union created for us a fresh Golconda every 
month, if it made every citizen wise as Solomon, blameless 
as St. John, and safe as an angel in the courts of Heaven, 
to cling to it would still be a damnable crime, hateful to 
God, while its cement was the blood of the negro — while 



THE LESSON OF THE HOUR. 11 

it, and it alone, made the crime of slaveholding possible in 
fifteen States. 

Mr. Seward is a power in the State. It is worth while to 
understand his course. It cannot be caprice. His position 
decides that of millions. The instinct that leads him to 
take it shows his guess (and he rarely errs) what the ma- 
jority intend. I reconcile thus the utter difference and op- 
position of his campaign speeches, and his last one. I think 
he went West, sore at the loss of the nomination, but with 
too much good sense, perhaps magnanimity, to act over again 
Webster's sullen part when Taylor stole his rights. 

Still, Mr. Seward, though philosophic, though keen to an- 
alyze and unfold the theory of our politics, is not cunning in 
plans. He is only the hand and tongue ; his brain lives in 
private life on the Hudson River side. Acting under that 
guidance, he thought Mr. Lincoln not likely to go beyond, 
even if he were able to keep, the whole Chicago platform. 
Accordingly, he said, "I will give free rein to my natural feel- 
ings and real convictions, till these Abolitionists of the Re- 
publican ranks shall cry, 'Oh, what a mistake! We 
ought to have nominated Seward ; another time we will not 
be balked.' " Hence the hot eloquence and fearless tone of 
those prairie speeches. He returns to Washington, finds 
Mr. Lincoln sturdily insisting that his honor is pledged to 
keep, in office, every promise made in the platform. Then 
Mr. Seward shifts his course, saying, " Since my abolition- 
ism cannot take the wind from my rival's sails, I'll get credit 
as a Conservative. Accepting the premiership, I will fore- 
stall public opinion, and do all possible to bind the coming 
administration to a policy which I originate." He offers to 
postpone the whole Chicago Platform, in order to save the 
Union — though last October, at Chicago, he told us post- 
ponement never settles any thing, whether it is a lawsuit 
or national question ; better be beat and try again, than post- 
pone. 

This speech of Mr. Seward I regard as a declaration of 
war against the avowed policy of the incoming President. 
If Lincoln were an Andrew Jackson, as his friends aver, he 
would dismiss Mr. Seward from his Cabinet. The incoming 
administration, if honest and firm, has two enemies to fight, 
Mr. Seward and the South. 

His power is large. Already he has swept our Adams 



12 TI1E LESSON OF THE IIOUR. 

into the vortex, making him offer to sacrifice the whole 
Republican platform, though, as events have turned, he has 
sacrificed only his own personal honor. Fifteen years ago, 
John Quincy Adams prophesied that the Union would not 
last twenty years. He little thought that disunion, when it 
came, would swallow his son's honor in its gulf.* 

At such hours, New England Senators and Representa- 
tives have, from the very idea of their ultraism, little or no 
direct weight in Congress. But while New England is the 
brain of the Union, and therefore foreshadows what will be 
public opinion in the plastic West five years hence, it is c. 
momentous consequence that the people here should make 
their real feelings known ; that the pulpit and press should 
sound the bugle-note of utter defiance to slavery itself — 
Union or no Union, Constitution or no Constitution, freedom 
for every man between the oceans, and from the hot Gulf to 
the frozen Pole ! You may as well dam up Niagara with 
bulrushes as bind our anti-slavery purpose with congres- 
sional compromise. The South knows it. While she holds 
out her hand for Seward's offer, she keeps her eye fixed on 
us, to see what we think. Let her see that we laugh it to 
scorn. Sacrifice any thing to keep the slaveholding States 
in the Union? God forbid! we will rather build a bridge 
of gold, and pay their toll over it — accompany them out 
with glad noise of trumpets, and " speed the parting guest." 
Let them not " stand on the order of their going, but g<5 at 
once " ! Let them take the forts, empty our arsenals and 
sub-treasuries, and we will lend them beside jewels of gold 
and jewels of silver, and Egypt be glad when they are 
departed. (Laughter and applause.) 

But let the world distinctly understand why they go — 
to save slavery; and why we rejoice in their departure — 
because we know their declaration of independence is the 
jubilee of the slave. The eyes of the world are fixed on us 
as the great example of self-government. When this Union 
goes to pieces, it is a shock to the hopes of the struggling 
millions, of Europe. All lies bear bitter fruit. To-day is 
the inevitable fruit of our fathers' faithless compromise in 
1787. For the sake of the future, in freedom's name, let 

* Since this was said, Mr. Adams has had his reward — winning 
high office by treachery to his party, as his father did before, and as 
his grandfather tried to do and failed. 



THE LESSON OF THE HOUR. 13 

thinking Europe understand clearly why we sever. They 
saw Mr. Seward paint, at Chicago, our utter demoralization, 
Church and State, government and people, all classes, edu- 
cated and uneducated — all brought by the Slave Power, he 
said, to think slavery a blessing, and do any thing to save it. 
So utter did he consider this demoralization, that he des- 
paired of Native Americans, and trusted to the hunted pa- 
triots and the refuse of Europe, which the emigrant trains 
bore by his house, for the salvation of the valley of the Mis- 
sissippi. To-day, they see that very man kneeling to that 
Slave Power, and begging her to take all, but only consent 
to grant him such a Union — Union with such a Power ! 
How, then, shall Kossuth answer, when Austria laughs him 
to scorn ? Shall Europe see the slaveholder kick the reluc- 
tant and kneeling North out of such a Union ? How, then, 
shall Garibaldi dare look in the face of Napoleon ? If, there- 
fore, it were only to honor self-government, to prove that it 
educates men, not pedlers and cowards, let us proclaim our 
faith that honest labor can stand alone ; its own right hand 
amply able to earn its bread and defend its rights (ap- 
plause) ; and, if it were not so, our readiness at any cost, to 
welcome disunion, when it comes bringing freedom to four / 
million of hapless slaves ! (Applause.) What a sad com- 
ment on free institutions, that they have produced a South of 
tyrants, and a North of cowards ; a South, ready to face any 
peril to save slavery, and a North unwilling to risk a dollar ' 
to serve freedom ? 

Why do I set so little value on the Union ? Because I 
consider it a failure ; certainly, so far as slavery is concerned, 
it is a failure. If you doubt me, look at the picture of its 
effects which Mr. Seward painted at Chicago. ^ 

Look at our history. Under it, 700,000 slaves have in- 
creased to 4,000,000. We have paid $800,000,000 directly 
to the support of slavery. This secession will cost the Union 
and business $200,000,000 more. The loss which this 
disturbing force has brought to our trade and industry, 
within sixty years, it would be safe to call $500,000,000. 
Is the Union a pecuniary success ? Under it, slavery has 
been strong enough to rule the nation for sixty years, and 
now breaks it to pieces because it can rule no longer. Un- 
der it, public morals have been so lowered, that while, at its 
outset, nine men out of ten were proud to be called Abo- , 
2 



14 THE LESSON OP THE HOUR. 

litionists, now, nine out of ten would deem it not only an 
insult, but a pecuniary injury, to be charged with being so. 
Ever since it existed, its friends have confessed that to save 
it, it was necessary and proper to crush free speech. Wit- 
ness John Adams' sedition laws. Witness mobs of well- 
dressed merchants in every Northern city now. Witness 
one-half of the Republican party lamenting free speech, this 
hour, throughout the North. 

Mr. Seward confessed, at Chicago, that neither free speech 
nor free suffrage existed in one-half of the States. No 
Northern man can trade, live, or talk there. For twenty 
years, men have been mobbed, robbed, lynched, hung, and 
burned there, solely for loving liberty ; and while the Fed- 
eral Government never lifted a finger to prevent or punish 
it, the very States whose citizens have been outraged, have 
been too indifferent even to remonstrate. Massachusetts, 
who once remonstrated, saw her own agent mobbed out of 
Charleston with her full consent. 

Before the Union existed, Washington and Jefferson 
uttered the boldest anti-slavery opinions ; to-day they would 
be lynched in their own homes ; and their sentiments have 
been mobbed this very year in every great city of the North. 
The Fugitive Slave Bill could never have been passed nor 
executed in the days of Jay. Now, no man who hopes for 
office dares to insist that it is unconstitutional. Slavery has 
turned our churches of Christ to churches of commerce. 

John Quincy Adams, the child of our earlier civilization, 
said the Union was worthless, weighed against that liberty 
it was meant to secure. Mr. Seward, child of the Union, 
says there are few men, and there ought to be few, who 
would not prefer saving the Union to securing freedom ; 
and standing to-day at the head of nineteen million of free 
men, he confesses he does not deem it prudent to express 
his " most cherished convictions " on this subject,* while 

* Mr. Seward said, at St. Paul, last September : " I do not be- 
lieve there lias been one day, since 1787, until now, when slavery had 
any power in this government, except what it derived from buying up 
men of weak virtue, no principle, and great cupidity, and terrifying 
men of weak nerve in the Free States." * * * " Fellow-citizens, 
either in one way or the other, whether you agree with me in attribut- 
ing it to the interposition of Divine Providence or not, this battle has 
been fought, this victory has been won. Slavery to-day is, for the 
first time, not only powerless, but without influence in the American 



THE LESSON OF THE HOUR. 15 

every honest man fears, and three-fourths of Mr. Seward's 
followers hope, that the North, in this conflict of right and 
wrong, will, spite of Horace Greeley's warning, "love Lib- 
erty less than Profit, dethrone Conscience, and set up Com- 
merce in its stead." You know it. A Union whose des- 
potism is so cruel and searching that one-half our lawyers 
and one-half our merchants stifle conscience for bread — in 
the name of Martin Luther and John Milton, of Algernon 
Sydney and Henry Vane, of John Jay and Samuel Adams, 
I declare such a Union a failure. 

It is for the chance of saving such a Union that Mr. 
Seward and Mr. Adams break in Washington all the prom- 
ises of the canvass, and countenance measures which stifle 
the conscience and confuse the moral sense of the North. 
Say not that my criticism of them is harsh. I know their 
philosophy. It is, conciliate, compromise, postpone, practise 
finesse, make promises, or break them, do any thing, to gain 
time and concentrate the North against slavery. Our fathers 
tried that policy in 1787. That they miserably failed is 
proved by a Capitol filled with knaves and traitors, yet able 
to awe and ruin honest men. It was tried in 1821, and 
failed. It was tried in 1850, and failed. Who is auda- 
cious enough to ask another trial ? The Republicans say, 
" Conciliate, use soft language, organize — behind the door — 
bands of volunteers ; and when we have saved Washington, 
we may dare speak out." That is good policy for midnight 
conspirators. But if we are a government, if we are a na- 
tion, we should say, " Tell the truth ! If coercion is our 
policy, tell the truth. Call for volunteers in every State, 
and vindicate the honor of the nation in the light of the 
sun ! " (Applause.) 

The cunning which equivocates to-day, in order to secure 
a peaceful inauguration on the 4th of March, will yield up 

Republic." * * * " For the first time in the history of the Re- 
public, the Slave Power has not even the power to terrify or alarm 
the frcemau so as to make him submit and scheme and coincide and 
compromise. It rails now with a feeble voice, as it thundered in our 
ears for twenty or thirty years past. With a feeble and muttering 
voice, they cry out that "they will tear the Union to pieces. Who's 
afraid ? They complain that if we wiil not surrender our principles 
and our system and our right — being a majority — to rule, and if 
we will not accept their svstem, and such rules as they will give us, 
they will go out of the "Union. Who's afraid? Nobody's afraid; 
nobody can be bought." [Yet now Mr. Seward himself trembles !] 



/ 



16 THE LESSON OF THE HOUR. 

all its principles before the 1st of July. Beside, when 
opiate speeches have dulled the Northern conscience, and 
kneeling speeches have let down its courage, who can be 
sure that even Seward's voice, if he retain the wish, can 
conjure up again such a North as stands face to face with 
Southern arrogance to-day ? 

The Union, then, is a failure. What harm can come 
from disunion, and what good ? 

The seceding States will form a Sou'.iern Confederacy. 
We may judge of its future from the history of Mexico. 
The Gulf States intend to re-open the slave trade. If 
Kentucky and Tennessee, Virginia, Maryland, and North 
Carolina secede, the opening of that trade will ruin them, 
and they will gravitate to us, free. Louisiana cannot se- 
cede, except on paper ; the omnipotent West needs her ter- 
ritory as the mouth of its river. She must stay with us as 
a State or a conquered province, and may have her choice. 
(Laughter.) Beside, she stands on sugar, and free trade 
bankrupts her. Consider the rest of the Slave States as 
one Power, how can it harm us ? Let us see the ground 

*' of Mr. Seward's fears. Will it increase our expenses or 
lessen our receipts ? No ; every one of those States costs 
the Union more than it contributes to it. Can it harm us 
by attacks ? States without commerce or manufactures, and 
with an army of four millions of natural enemies encamped 
among them, have given bonds to keep the peace. Will 
they leave us so small and weak by going that we cannot 
stand alone ? Let us see. There is no reason to suppose 
that the Free States, except California, will not cling together. 
Idem velle, idem nolle — to like and dislike the same things, 
says the Latin proverb, is friendship. When a great num- 
ber of persons agree in a great number of things, that en- 
sures a union; that is not the case with the North and 
South, therefore we separate; that is the case with the 
whole North, therefore we shall remain united. How 
strong shall we be ? Our territory will be twice as large 

/ as Austria, three times as large as France, four times as 
large as Spain, six times as large as Italy, seven times as 
large as Great Britain. Those nations have proved, for a 
considerable period, that they had sufficient land to stand 
on. Our population will be about nineteen millions — more 

" than the Union had in 1840. I do not think we were much 



THE LESSON OF THE HOUR. 17 

afraid of anybody in 1840. Our blood is largely Yankee, 
a race that saved Carolina from her own Tories, in the 
Revolution. (Laughter.) Without that hindrance, we 
could fight now, certainly, as well as we did then; and 
then, with three million men only, we measured swords 
with the ablest nation of Europe, and conquered. I think, 
therefore, we have no reason to be very nervously anxious 
now. Indeed, Mr. Seward's picture of the desolation and ' 
military weakness of the divided States, if intended for the 
North, is the emptiest lie in his speech. I said lie; I 
meant it. I will tell you why. Because one William H. y 
Seward said, last fall, at Lansing, " We are maintaining a 
standing army at the heavy cost of one thousand dollars per 
man, and a standing navy — for what? to protect Michigan 
or Massachusetts, New York or Ohio ? No ; there is not a 
nation on the face of the earth which would dare to attack 
these Free States, or any of them, if they were even disunited. 
We are doing it in order that slaves may not escape from 
Slave States into the Free, and to secure those States from 
domestic insurrection ; and because, if we provoke a foreign 
foe, slavery cries out that it is in danger." Surely, the 
speaker of those words has no right to deny that our ex- 
penses and danger will be less, and our power to meet both 
greater, when the Slave States are gone. 

Indeed, everybody knows this. And this trembling dread 
of losing the Union, which so frightens the people that, in 
view of it, Mr. Seward, as a practical man, dares not now 
tell, as he says, what he really thinks and wishes, is the 
child of his and Webster's insincere idolatry of the Union. 
To serve party and personal ambition, they made a god of 
the Union ; and to-day their invention returns to plague the 
inventors. They made the people slaves to a falsehood ; 
and that same deluded people have turned their fetters into 
gags for Mr. Seward's lips. Thank God for the retribu- 
tion ! 

But the Union created commerce ; disunion will kill it.^ 
The Union the mother of commerce ? I doubt it. I ques- 
tion whether the genius and energy of the Yankee race are 
not the parent of commerce and the fountain of wealth, 
much more than the Union. That race, in Holland, firsts 
created a country, and then, standing on piles, called modern 
commerce into being. That race, in England, with territory 
2* 



18 THE LESSON OF THE HOUR. 

just wide enough to keep its eastern and western harbors 
apart, monopolized, for centuries, the trade of the world, 
and annexed continents only as coffers wherein to garner its 
wealth. Who shall say that the same blood, with only New 
England for its anchorage, could not drag the wealth of the 
West into its harbors ? Who shall say that the fertile lands 
of Virginia and the Mississippi enrich us because they will 
to do so, and not because they are compelled ? As long as 
New England is made of granite and the nerves of lier sons 
of steel, she will be, as she always has been, the brain of 
North America, united or disunited ; and harnessing the 
elements, steam and lightning, to her car of conquest, she 
will double the worth of every prairie acre by her skill, 
cover ocean with her canvas, and gather the wealth of the 
western hemisphere into her harbors. % 

Despite, then, of Seward's foreboding, our confederacy 
will be strong, safe, and rich. Honest it will be, and there- 
fore happy. Its nobleness will be, that, laughing at proph- 
ets, and scorning chances, it has taken the prop from the 
slave system, and in one night the whole fabric will tumble 
to pieces. Disunion is abolition ! That is all the value dis- 
union has for me. I care little for forms of government, 
or extent of territory ; whether ten States or thirty make up 
the Union. No foreign State dare touch us, united or dis- 
united. It matters not to me whether Massachusetts is 
worth one thousand millions, as now, or two thousand mil- 
lions, as she might be, if she had no Carolina to feed, pro- 
tect, and carry the mails for. The music of disunion to me 
is, that at its touch, the slave breaks into voice, shouting his 
jubilee. 

What supports slavery ? Northern bayonets, calming the 
masters' fears. Mr. Seward's words, which I have just 
quoted, tell you what he thinks the sole use of our army 
and navy. Disunion leaves God's natural laws to work 
their good results. God gives every animal means of self- 
protection. Under God's law, insurrection is the tyrant's 
check. Let us stand out of the path, and allow the divine 
law to have free course. 

Next, Northern opinion is the opiate of Southern con- 
science. Disunion changes that. Public opinion forms 
governments, and again governments react to mould opin- 



THE LESSON OF THE HOUR. 19 

ion. Here is a government just as much permeated by 
slavery as China or Japan is with idolatry. 

The Republican party take possession of this govern- 
ment. How are they to undermine the Slave Power? 
That power is composed, 1st, of the inevitable influence of 
wealth, $2,000,000,000, — the worth of the slaves in the 
Union, — so much capital drawing to it the sympathy of all 
other capital ; 2d, of the artificial aristocracy created by the 
three-fifths slave basis of the Constitution ; 3d, by the po- 
tent and baleful prejudice of color. 

The aristocracy of the Constitution ! Where have you 
seen an aristocracy with half its power? You may take a 
small town here in New England, with a busy, active popu- 
lation of 2,500, and three or four such men as Gov. Aiken, 
of South Carolina, riding leisurely to the polls, and throw- 
ing their visiting cards in for ballots, will blot out the entire 
influence of that New England town in the Federal Govern- 
ment. That is your Republicanism ! Then, when you add 
to that the element of prejudice, which is concentrated in 
the epithet that spells negro with two " gg's," you make the 
three-strand cable of the Slave Power — the prejudice of 
race, the omnipotence of money, and the almost irresistible 
power of aristocracy. That is the Slave Power. 

How is Mr. Lincoln to undermine it while in the Union ? 
Certainly, by turning every atom of patronage and pecun- 
iary profit in the keeping of the Federal Government to the 
support of freedom. You know that policy has been always 
acted upon ever since Washington, and it has been openly 
avowed ever since Fillmore. No man was to receive any 
office who was not sound on the slavery question. You re- 
member the debate in the Senate, when that was distinctly 
avowed to be the policy of Mr. Fillmore. You remember 
Mr. Clay letting it drop out accidentally, in debate, that the 
slaveholders had always closely watched the Cabinet, and 
kept a majority there, in order to preserve the ascendency 
of slavery. This is the policy which, in the course of fifty 
years, has built up the Slave Power. Now, how is the Re- 
publican party ever to beat that Power down? By revers- 
ing that policy, in favor of freedom. Cassius Clay said to 
me, five years ago : " If you will allow me to have the pat- 
ronage of this government five years, and exercise it re- 
morselessly, down to New Orleans ; never permit any one 



20 THE LESSON OF THE HOUR. 

but an avowed Abolitionist to hold office under the Federal 
Government, I will revolutionize the Slave States them- 
selves in two administrations." That is a scheme of efficient 
politics. But the Republican party has never yet professed 
any such policy. 

Mr. Greeley, on the contrary, avowed in the Tribune, 
that he had often voted for a slaveholder willingly, and he 
never expected the time would come when he should lay 
down the principle of refusing to vote for a slaveholder to 
office ; and that sentiment has not only been reiterated by 
others of the Republican party, but has never been disa- 
vowed by any one. But suppose you could develop politics 
up to this idea, that the whole patronage of the goverrihient 
should be turned in favor of Abolition ; it would take two 
or three generations to overthrow what the Slave Power 
has done in sixty years, with the strength of aristocracy and 
the strength of prejudice on its side. With only the pat- 
ronage of the government in its control, the Republican 
party must work slowly to regenerate the government 
against those two elements in opposition, when, with them 
in its favor, the Slave Power has been some sixty years in 
brinsrino; about such a result as we see around us. To re- 
verse this, and work only with the patronage of the govern- 
ment, it would take you long to effect the cure. In my soul, 
I believe that a dissolution of the Union, sure to result 
speedily in the abolition of slavery, would be a lesser evil 
than the slow, faltering, diseased, gradual dying-out of 
slavery, constantly poisoning us with the festering remains 
of this corrupt political, social, and literary state. I believe 
a sudden, conclusive, definite disunion, resulting in the abo- 
lition of slavery, in the disruption of the Northern mind 
from all connection with it, all vassalage to it, immediately, 
would be a better, healthier, and more wholesome cure, than 
to let the Republican party exert this gradual influence 
through the power of the government for thirty or sixty 
years. 

We are seeking the best way to get rid of a great national 
evil. Mr. Seward's way is to put down the Union as a 
"fixed fact," and then educate politics up to a certain level. 
In that way we have to live, like Sinbad, with Cushing, and 
Hillard, and Hallett, and O'Connor, and Douglas, and men 
like them, on our shoulders, for the next thirty or forty 



THE LESSON OP THE HOUR. 21 

years ; with the Deweys and President Lords, and all that 
class of men, — and all this timid servility of the press, all 
this lack of virtue and manhood, all this corruption of the 
pulpit, all this fossil hunkerism, all this selling of the soul 
for a mess of pottage, is to linger, working in the body pol- 
itic for thirty or forty years, and we are gradually to elimi- 
nate the disease ! What an awful future ! What a miser- 
able chronic disease ! What a wreck of a noble nation the 
American Republic is to be for fifty years ! 

And why ? Only to save a piece of parchment that El- 
bridge Gerry had instinct enough to think did not deserve 
saving, as long ago as 1789 ! Mr. Seward would leave 
New York united to New Orleans, with the hope (sure to be 
balked) of getting freer and freer from year to year. I want 
to place her, at once, in the same relation towards New Or- 
leans that she bears to Liverpool. You can do it, the mo- 
ment you break the political tie. What will that do ? I 
will tell you. The New York pulpit is to-day one end of a 
magnetic telegraph, of which the New Orleans cotton market 
is the other. The New York stock-market is one end of 
the magnetic telegraph, and the Charleston Mercury is the 
other. New York statesmanship ! Why, even in the lips 
of Seward, it is sealed, or half sealed, by considerations that 
take their rise in the cane-brakes and cotton-fields of fifteen 
States. Break up this Union, and the ideas of South Caro- 
lina will have no more influence on Seward than those of 
Palmerston. The wishes of New Orleans would have no 
more influence on Chief Justice Bigelow than the wishes of 
London. The threats of Davis, Toombs, and Keitt will 
have no more influence on the Tribune than the thunders 
of the London Times or the hopes of the Chartists. Our 
Bancrofts will no longer write history with one eye fixed on 
Democratic success, nor our Websters invent " laws of God " 
to please Mr. Senator Douglas. We shall have as close 
connection, as much commerce ; we shall still have a com- 
mon language, a common faith and common race, the same 
common social life ; we shall intermarry just the same ; we 
shall have steamers running just as often and just as rapidly 
as now. But what cares Dr. Dewey for the opinion of Liv- 
erpool ? Nothing ! What cares he for the opinion of Wash- 
ington? Every thing! Break the link, and New York 
springs up like the fountain relieved from a mountain load, 



22 THE LESSON OP THE HOUR. 

and assumes her place among decent cities. I mean no 
special praise of the English courts, pulpit, or press, by these 
comparisons ; my only wish is to show that however close 
the commercial relations might continue to be between 
North and South, and in spite of that common faith, and 
common tongue and common history, which would continue 
to hold these thirty States together, still, as in the case of 
this country and England, wedded still by those ties, the 
mere sundering of a political union would leave each half 
free, as that of 1776 did, from a very large share of the 
corrupt influence of the other. 

That is what I mean by Disunion. I mean to take Mas- 
sachusetts, and leave her exactly as she is, commercially. 
She shall manufacture for the South just as Lancashire does. 
I know what an influence the South has on the manufac- 
turers and clergy of England ; — that is inevitable, in the 
nature of things. We have only human nature to work 
with, and we cannot raise it up to the level of angels. We 
shall never get beyond the sphere of human selfishness, but 
we can lift this human nature up to a higher level, if we can 
but remove the weight of this political relation which now 
rests upon it. What I would do with Massachusetts is this 

— I would make her, in relation to South Carolina, just 
what England is. I would that I could float her off, and 
anchor her in mid-ocean ! 

Severed from us, South Carolina must have a govern- 
ment. You see now a reign of terror — threats to raise 
means. That can only last a day. Some system must give 
support to a government. It is an expensive luxury. You 
must lay taxes to support it. Where will you levy your 
taxes ? They must rest on productions. Productions are 
the result of skilled labor. You must educate your laborer, 
if you would have the means for carrying on a government. 
Despotisms are cheap ; free governments are a dear luxury 

— the machinery is complicated and expensive. If the 
South wants a theoretical republic, she must pay for it — 
she must have a basis for taxation. How will she pay for 
it? Why, Massachusetts, with a million workmen — men, 
women, and children, — the little feet that can just toddle 
bringing chips from the wood-pile, — Massachusetts only 
pays her own board and lodging, and lays by about four per 
cent a year. And South Carolina, with one-half idlers, 



THE LESSON OF THE HOUR. 23 

and the other half slaves, — a slave doing only half the 
work of a free man, — only one-quarter of the population 
actually at work, how much do you suppose she lays up ? 
Lays up a loss ! By all the laws of political economy, she 
lays up bankruptcy ; of course she does ! Put her out, and 
let her see how sheltered she has been from the laws of trade 
by the Union ! The free labor of the North pays her plan- 
tation patrol ; we pay for her government, we pay for her 
postage, and for every thing else. Launch her out, and let 
her see if she can make the year's ends meet ! And when 
she tries, she must educate her labor in order to get the 
basis for taxation. Educate slaves! Make a locomotive 
with its furnaces of open wire work, fill them with anthra- 
cite coal, and when you have raised it to white heat, mount 
and drive it through a powder magazine, and you are safe, 
compared with a slaveholding community educating its 
slaves. But South Carolina must do it, in order to get the 
basis for taxation to support an independent government. 
The moment she does it, she removes the safeguard of slav- 
ery. What is the contest in Virginia now ? Between the 
men who want to make their slaves mechanics, for the in- 
creased wages it will secure, and the men who oppose, for 
fear of the influence it will have on the general security of 
slave property and white throats. Just that dispute will go 
on, wherever the Union is dissolved. Slavery comes to an 
end by the laws of trade. Hang up your Sharp's rifle, my 
valorous friend ! The slave does not ask the help of your 
musket. He only says, like old Diogenes to Alexander, 
" Stand out of my light ! " Just take your awkward pro- 
portions, you Yankee Democrat and Republican, out of the 
light and heat of God's laws of political economy, and they 
will melt the slave's chains away ! 

Indeed, I much doubt whether the South can maintain 
her cotton culture at all, as a separate, Slave holding Gov- 
ernment. Cotton is only an annual in the United States. 
In St. Domingo and the tropics it is a tree lasting from five 
to twenty years. Within the Union, it is then, strictly 
speaking, a forced product ; or, at least, it touches the high- 
est northern belt of possible culture, only possible there 
under very favorable circumstances. We all know how 
hard and keen is the competition of this generation ; men 
clutching bread only by restless hands and brains. Expose 



24 THE LESSON OF THE HOUR. 

now our cotton to the full competition of India, Africa, and 
the tropics ; burden it by taxes, with the full cost of a Slave- 
holding Government, necessarily an expensive one, — a tax 
it has never yet felt, having shirked it on to the North ; — 
quicken other cotton fields into greater activity by the un- 
willingness of France and England to trust their supply to 
States convulsed by political quarrels, — and then see if, in 
such circumstances, the price of cotton in the markets of 
the world will not rule so low, that to raise it by slovenly 
slave-culture will not be utter loss — so utter as to drive it 
wholly from our States, at least while they remain Slave 
States. 

Indeed, the Gulf States are essentially in a feudal con- 
dition, an aristocracy resting on slaves, — no middle class. 
To sustain Government on the costly model of our age ne- 
cessitates a middle class of trading, manufacturing energy. 
The merchant of the nineteenth century spurns to be a 
subordinate. The introduction of such a class will create 
in the Gulf States that very irrepressible conflict which 
they leave us to avoid — which, alive now in the Border 
States, makes these unwilling to secede, — which once cre- 
ated will soon undermine the aristocracy of the Gulf States 
and bring them back to us free. 

Take your distorted Union, your nightmare monster, out 
of the light and range of those laws of trade and competi- 
tion ; then, without any sacrifice on your part, slavery will 
go to pieces ! God made it a law of his universe, that vil- 
lany should always be loss ; and if you will only not attempt, 
with your puny efforts, to stand betwixt the inevitable laws 
of God's kingdom, as you are doing to-day, and have done 
for sixty years, by the vigor that the industry of sixteen 
States has been able to infuse into the sluggish veins of the 
South, slavery will drop to pieces by the very influence of 
the competition of the nineteenth century. That is what 
we mean by Disunion ! 

That is my coercion ! Northern pulpits cannonading the 
Southern conscience ; Northern competition emptying its 
pockets ; educated slaves awaking its fears ; civilization 
and Christianity beckoning the South into their sisterhood. 
Soon every breeze that sweeps over Carolina will bring to 
our ears the music of repentance, and even she will carve 



THE LESSON OF THE HOUR. 25 

on her Palmetto, " We hold this truth to be self-evident — 
that all men are created equal." 

All hail, then, Disunion ! " Beautiful on the mountains 
are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publish- 
eth peace, that saith unto Zion, Thy God reigneth." The 
sods of Bunker Hill shall be greener, now that their great 
purpose is accomplished. Sleep in peace, martyr of Har- 
per's Ferry ! — jour life was not given in vain. Rejoice, 
spirits of Fayette and Kosciusko! — the only stain upon 
your swords is passing away. Soon, throughout all Amer- 
ica, there shall be neither power nor wish to hold a slave. 
3 



i 



PROGRESS. 



In accordance with his regular engagement, Wendell 
Phillips, Esq., addressed the Twenty-eighth Congrega- 
tional Society in Music Hall, Sunday forenoon, 17th inst. 
There were four thousand persons present, many unable to 
find seats. Mr. Phillips spoke upon " Progress," from the 
following text : — 



•e 



" And Jacob said unto Pharaoh, The days of the years of my pil- 
grimage are an hundred and thirty years : few and evil have the days 
of the years of my life been, and have not attained unto the clays of 
the years of the life of my fathers in the days of their pilgrimage." 

Thus spoke a prince who had won from his elder brother 
both birthright and blessing ; who had seen " the angels of 
God ascending and descending ; " was able to say, " With 
my staff I passed over this Jordan, and now I am become 
two bands ; " who had seen God face to face, and still lived ; 
to whom was pledged the Divine promise, " I will make of 
thee a great nation ; in thy seed shall all the families of the 
earth be blessed ; " whose ears had just drunk in the glad 
tidings of his favorite son, " Joseph is yet alive ; he is gov- 
ernor over all the land of Egypt." Thus timid and discon- 
solate gray hairs bewail their own times. To most men, the 
golden age is one long past. 

But Nature is ever growing. Science tells us every 
change is improvement. This globe, once a mass of molten 
granite, now blooms almost a paradise. So in man's life and 
history. One may not see it in his own short day. You 
must stand afar oif to judge St. Peter's. The shadow on 
the dial seems motionless, but it touches noon at last. Place 
the ages side by side, and see how they differ. Three-quar- 
ters of the early kings of France died poor and in prison, 
by the dagger or poison of their rivals. The Bonapartes 



28 PROGRESS. 

stole large fortunes and half the thrones of Europe, yet all 
died natural deaths in their beds, and though discrowned, 
kept their enormous wealth. 

When the English inarched from Boston to Concord, they 
fired into half the Whig dwellings they passed. When Lane 
crossed Kansas, pursuing Missouri ruffians, he sent men 
ahead to put a guard at every border ruffian's door, to save 
inmate and goods from harm. When Goldsmith reminded 
England that " a heart buried in a dungeon is as precious as 
that seated on a throne," there were one hundred and sixty- 
nine crimes punished with death. Now, not only England, 
but every land governed by the English race, is marked by 
the mildness of its penal code, only one, two, or three classes 
of offenders being now murdered by law. 

It is not yet fifteen years since the first Woman's Rights 
Convention was held. The first call for one in Massachu- 
setts, a dozen years ago, bore a name heard often in manful 
protest against popular sins — that of Waldo Emerson. But 
in that short fifteen years, a dozen States have changed their 
laws. One New r York statute, a year old, securing to mar- 
ried women control of their wages, will do more to save New 
York City from being grogshop and brothel than a thousand 
pulpits could do. When Kansas went to Topeka to frame 
a constitution, one-third of the Convention were in favor of 
giving woman the right to vote. Truly, the day breaks. 
If time served, I could find a score of familiar instances. 
It is enough to state the general principle, that civilization 
produces wants. Wants awaken intellect. To gratify them 
disciplines intellect. The keener the want, the lustier the 
growth. The power to use new truths in science, new ideas 
in morals or art, obliterates rank, and makes the lowest man 
useful or necessary to the State. Luther and Raphael, Ful- 
ton and Faust, Howard and Rousseau, mark the ages, not 
popes or kings. A Massachusetts mechanic, Eli Whitney, 
made cotton king ; a Massachusetts printer, William Lloyd 
Garrison, has undermined its throne. Thus, civilization in- 
sures equality. Types are the fathers of democrats. 

It is not always, however, ideas or moral principles that 
push the world forward. Selfish interests play a large part 
in the work. Our revolution of 1776 succeeded because 
trade and wealth joined hands with principle and enthusi- 
asm, a union rare in the history of revolutions. Northern 



PROGRESS. 29 

merchants fretted at England's refusal to allow them direct 
trade with Holland and the West Indies. Virginia planters, 
heavily mortgaged, welcomed any thing that would postpone 
payment of their debts — a motive that doubtless avails largely 
among secessionists now. So merchant and planter joined 
heartily with hot-headed Sam Adams, and reckless Joseph 
Warren, penniless John Adams, that brilliant adventurer, 
Alexander Hamilton, and that young scapegrace, Aaron 
Burr, to get independence. (Laughter.) To merchant, 
independence meant only direct trade — to planter, cheating 
his creditors. 

Present conflict of interests is another instrument of prog- 
ress. Religious persecution planted these States; com- 
mercial persecution brought about the Revolution ; John 
Bull's perseverance in a seven years' war fused us into one 
nation ; his narrow and ill-tempered effort to govern us by 
stealth, even after the peace of 1783, drove us to the Con- 
stitution of 1789. 

I think it was Coleridge who said, if he were a clergy- 
man in Cornwall, he should preach fifty-two sermons a year 
against wreckers. In the same spirit, I shall find the best 
illustration of our progress in the history of the slave ques- 
tion. 

Some men sit sad and trembling for the future, because 
the knell of this Union has sounded. But the heavens are 
almost all bright ; and if some sable clouds linger on the 
horizon, they have turned their silver linings almost wholly 
to our sight. Every man who possesses his soul in patience 
sees that disunion is gain, disunion is peace, disunion is 
virtue. 

Thomas Jefferson said, " It is unfortunate that the efforts 
of mankind to recover the freedom of which they have been 
deprived should be accompanied with violence, with errors, 
and even with crime. But while we weep over the means, 
we must pray for the end." 

We may see our future in the glass of our past history. 
The whole connection of Massachusetts Colony with Eng- 
land was as much disgrace as honor to both sides. On the 
part of England, it was an attempt to stretch principles 
which were common sense and justice applied to an island, 
but absurd and tyrannical applied across the ocean. It was 
power without right, masked in form. On the side of the 
3* 



30 PROGRESS. 

Colony, it was petty shifts, quibbles, equivocations, cunning 
dodges, white lies, ever the resource of weakness. While 
England was bull-dog, Massachusetts was fox. Whoever 
cannot take his right openly by force, steals what he can by 
fraud. The Greek slave was a liar, as all slaves are. De 
Tocqueville says, '"Men are not corrupted by the exercise 
of power, nor debased by submission ; but by the exercise 
of power they think illegal, and submission to a rule they 
consider oppressive." That sentence is a key to our whole 
colonial history. When we grew strong enough to dare to 

«/ be frank, we broke with England. Timid men wept ; but 
now we see how such disunion was gain, peace, and virtue. 
Indeed, seeming disunion was real union. We were then 

y two snarling hounds, leashed together ; we are now one in a 
true marriage, one in blood, trade, thought, religion, history, 
in mutual love and respect ; w r here one then filched silver 
from the other, each now pours gold into the other's lap ; 
our only rivalry, which shall do most honor to the blood of 

z Shakspeare and Milton, of Franklin and Kane. 

In that glass we see the story of North and South since 
1787, and I doubt not for all coming time. The people of 
the States between the Gulf and the great Lakes, yes, 
between the Gulf and the Pole, are essentially one. We 
are one in blood, trade, thought, religion, history ; noth- 
ing can long divide us. If we had let our Constitution 
grow, as the English did, as oaks do, we had never passed 
through such scenes as the present. The only thing that 
divides us now, is the artificial attempt, in 1787, to force us 
into an unripe union. Some lawyers got together, and 
wrote out a Constitution. The people and great interests 
of the land, wealth, thought, fashion, and creed, immediately 
laid it upon the shelf, and proceeded to grow one for them- 
selves. The treaty power sufficed to annex a continent, and 
change the whole nature of the government. The war power 
builds railroads to the Pacific. Right to regulate commerce 
builds observatories and dredges out lakes. Right to tax 
protects manufactures ; and had we wanted a king, some 
ingenious Yankee would have found the right to have one 
clearly stated in the provision for a well-regulated militia. 
(Laughter.) All that is valuable in the United States Con- 
stitution is a thousand years old. What is good is not new, 

, and what is new is not good. That vaunted statesmanship 



PROGRESS. 31 

which concocts constitutions never has amounted to any r 
thing. The English Constitution, always found equal to 
any crisis, is an old mansion, often repaired, with quaint ad- 
ditions, and seven gables, each of different pattern. Our 
Constitution is a new clapboard house, so square and sharp 
it almost cuts you to look at it, staring with white paint and 
green blinds, as if dropped in the landscape, or come out to - 
spend an afternoon. (Laughter.) 

The trouble now is, that, in regard to the most turbulent 
question of the age, our politicians and a knot of privileged 
slaveholders are trying to keep the people inside of this 
parchment band. Like Lycurgus, they would mould the - 
people to- fit the Constitution, instead of cutting the Consti- 
tution to fit the people. Goethe said, " If you plant an oak in 
a flower vase, one of two things will happen — the oak will 
die, or the vase break." Our acorn swelled ; the tiny leaves 
showed themselves under the calm eye of Washington, and 
lie laid down in hope. By and by, the roots enlarged, and 
men trembled. Of late, Webster and Clay, Everett and 
Botts, Seward and Adams, have been anxiously clasp- 
ing the vase, but the roots have burst abroad at last, and the 
porcelain is in pieces. (Sensation.) All ye who love oaks, 
thank God for so much! That Union of 1787 was one of 
fear ; we were driven into it by poverty and the commer- 
cial hostility of England. As cold masses up all things, — * 
sticks earth, stones, and water into dirty ice, — heat first 
makes separation, and then unites those of the same nature. 
The heat of sixty years' agitation has severed the hetero- 
geneous mass ; wait awhile, it will fuse together all that is 
really one. 

Let me show you why I think the present so bright, and 
why I believe that disunion is gain, peace, and honor. 

Why is the present hour sunshine? Because, for the 
first time in our history, we have a North. That event 
which Mr. Webster anticipated and prophesied has come to 
pass. In a real, true sense, we have a North. By which I 
do not mean that the North rules, though, politically speak- 
ing, the crowned and sceptred North does, indeed, take her 
seat in that council where she has thus far been only a tool. 
But I mean that free men, honest labor, makes itself heard 
in our State. The North ceases to be fox or spaniel, and 



32 PROGRESS. 

puts on the lion. She asserts and claims. She no longer 
beg?, cheats, or buys. 

Understand me. In 1787, slave property, worth, perhaps, 
two hundred million of dollars, strengthened by the sym- 
pathy of all other capital, was a mighty power. It was the 
Rothschild of the State. The Constitution, by its three-ffths 
slave basts, made slaveholders an order of nobles. It was 
the house of Hapsburg joining hands with the house of Roths- 
child. Prejudice of race was the third strand of the cable, 
bitter and potent as Catholic ever bore Huguenot, or Hun- 
gary ever spit on Moslem. This fearful trinity won to its 
side that mysterious omnipotence called Fashion — a power 
which, without concerted action, without either thought, law, 
or religion on its side, seems stronger than all of them, and 
fears no foe but wealth. Such was slavery. In its pres- 
ence the North always knelt and whispered. When slav- 
ery could not bully, it bubbled its victim. In the convention 
that framed the Constitution, Massachusetts men said, as 
Charles Francis Adams says now, " What matters a pitiful 
three-fifths slave basis, and guarantee against insurrection, to 
an institution on its death-bed — gasping for its last breath? 
It may conciliate — is only a shadow — nothing more — why 
stand on words ? " So they shut their eyes, as he does, on 
realities, and chopped excellent logic on forms. 

But at that moment, the Devil hovered over Charleston, 
with a handful of cotton-seed. (Applause.) Dropped into 
sea-island soil, and touched by the magic of Massachusetts 
brains, it poisoned the atmosphere of thirty States. That 
cotton fibre w r as a rod of empire such as Caesar never 
wielded. It fattened into obedience pulpit and rostrum, 
court, market-place and college, and leashed New York and 
Chicago to its chair of State. Beware, Mr. Adams, " he 
needs a long spoon who sups with the Devil." In the ka- 
leidoscope of the future, no statesman eye can foresee the 
forms. God gives narrow manhood but one clue to success 
— utter and exact justice ; that he guarantees shall be al- 
ways expediency. Deviate one hair's-breath — grant but a 
dozen slaves — only the tiniest seed of concession — you 
know not how u many and tall branches of mischief shall grow 
therefrom." That handful of cotton-seed has perpetuated a 
system which, as Emerson says, " impoverishes the soil, de- 



PROGRESS. 33 

populates the country, demoralizes the master, curses the 
victim, enrages the b}'stander, poisons the atmosphere, and 
hinders civilization." 

I need not go over the subsequent compromises in detail. 
They are always of the same kind : mere words, Northern 
men assured us — barren concessions. "Physical geog- 
raphy and Asiatic scenery " hindered any harm. But the 
South was always specially anxious to have these barren 
" words," and marvellously glad when she got them. North- 
ern politicians, in each case, were either bullied or cheated, 
or feigned to be bullied, as they are about to do now. And 
the people were glad to have it so. I do not know that the 
politicians are a whit better now than then. I should not be 
willing to assert that Seward and Adams are any more hon- 
est than Webster and Winthrop, and certainly they have 
just as much spaniel in their make. 

But the gain to-day is, we have a people. Under their 
vigilant eyes, mindful of their sturdy purpose, sustained by 
their determination, many of our politicians act much better. 
And out of this popular heart is growing a Constitution 
which will wholly supersede that of 1787. 

A few years ago, while Pierce was President, the Repub- 
lican party dared to refuse the appropriations for support of 
government — the most daring act ever ventured in a land 
that holds Bunker Hill and Brandy wine. They dared to 
persevere some twenty or thirty days. It seems a trifle ; 
but it is a very significant straw. Then for weeks when 
Banks was elected, and a year ago, again, the whole gov- 
ernment was checked till the Republicans put their Speaker 
in the chair. Now the North elects her President, the 
South secedes. I suppose we shall be bargained away into 
compromise. I know the strength and virtue of the farming 
West. It is one of the bright spots that our sceptre tends 
there, rather than to the seaboard. Four or eight years 
hence, when this earthquake will repeat itself, the West may 
be omnipotent, and we shall see brave things. It is not the 
opinion of the absolute majority that rules, but that amount 
of public opinion which can be brought to bear on a partic- 
ular point at a given time. Therefore the compact, ener- 
getic, organized Seaboard, with the press in its hand, rules 
spite of the wide-spread, inert, unorganized West. While 



34 PROGRESS. 

the agricultural frigate is getting its broadside ready, the 
commercial clipper has half finished its slave voyage. 

In spite of Lincoln's wishes, therefore, I fear he will never 
be able to stand against Seward, Adams, half the Republi- 
can wire-pullers and the seaboard. But even now, if Sew- 
ard and the rest had stood firm, as Lincoln, Sumner, Chase, 
Wade, and Lovejoy, and the Tribune have hitherto done, I 
believe you might have polled the North, and had a re- 
sponse, three to one, " Let the Union go to pieces, rather 
than yield one inch." I know no sublimer hour in history. 
The sight of these two months is compensation for a life of 
toil. Never let Europe taunt us again that our blood is 
• wholly cankered by gold. Our people stood, willing their 
idolized government should go to pieces for an idea. True, 
other nations have done so. England in 1640 — France in 
/ 1791 — our colonies in 1775. Those were proud moments. 
But to-day touches a nobler height. Their idea was their 
own freedom. To-day, the idea, loyal to which our people 
willingly see their Union wrecked, is largely the hope of jus- 
' tice to a dependent, helpless, hated race. Revolutions never 
go backward. The live force of a human pulse-beat can 
rive the dead lumber of government to pieces. Chain the 
Hellespont, Mr. Xerxes-Seward, before you dream of balk- 
ing the Northern heart of its purpose — freedom to the 
slave ! The old sea never laughed at Persian chains more 
haughtily than we do at Congress-compromises. 

I reverently thank God that he has given me to see such 
a day as this. Remember the measureless love of the North 
for the Union, — its undoubting faith that disunion is ruin,-— 
and then value as you ought this last three months. If Wil- 
berforce could say on his death-bed, after fifty years' toil, 
" Thank God, I have lived to see the day that England is 
willing to give twenty million sterling for the abolition of 
slavery," what ought our gratitude to be for such a sight as 
this ? Twenty millions of people willing, would only their 
leaders permit, to barter their government for the hope of 
justice to the negro ! And this result has come in defiance 
of the pulpit, spite of the half omnipotence of commerce, 
with all the so-called leaders of public opinion against us — 
literature, fashion, prejudice of race, and present interest. 
It is the uprising of common sense, the protest of common 



PROGRESS. 35 

conscience, the untaught, instinctive loyalty of the people to 
justice and right. 

But you will tell me of dark clouds, mobs in every North- 
ern city. Grant it, and more. When Lovejoy was shot, at 
Alton, Illinois, while defending his press, and Faneuil Hall 
was closed to his friends, William Ellery Charming, William 
Sturgis, and George Bond, the saints and merchants of Bos- 
ton, rallied to the defence of free speech. Now, we hold 
meetings only when and how the mayor permits (hisses and 
great applause), yet no merchant prince, no pulpit hero ral- 
lies to our side. But raise your eyes from the disgraced 
pavements of Boston, and look out broader. That same 
soil which drank the blood of Lovejoy, now sends his 
brother to lead Congress in its fiercest hour; that same 
prairie lifts his soul's son to crush the Union as he steps 
into the presidential chair. Sleep in peace, martyr of Alton, 
good has come out of Nazareth ! The shot which turned 
back our Star of the West from the waters of Charleston, 
and tolled the knell of the Union, was the rebound of the 
bullet that pierced your heart. 

When Lovejoy died, men used to ask, tauntingly, what 
good has the anti-slavery cause done ? what changes has it 
wrought ? As well stand over the cradle, and ask what use 
is a baby? He will be a man some time — the anti-slavery 
cause is now twenty-one years old. 

This hour is bright from another cause. Since 1800, our 
government has been only a tool of the Slave Power. The 
stronghold of anti-slavery has been the sentiment of the 
people. We have always prophesied that our government 
would be found too weak to bear so radical an agitation as 
this of slavery. It has proved so; the government is a 
wreck. But the people have shown themselves able to deal 
w j t h it — able to shake this sin from their lap as easily as the 
lion does dewdrops from his mane. 

Mark another thing. No Northern man will allow you 
to charge him with a willingness to extend slavery. No 
matter what his plan, he is anxious to show you it is not a 
compromise ! and will not extend slavery one inch ! Mr. 
Dana is eloquent on this point, Mr. Adams positive, Mr. 
Seward cunning, Thurlow Weed indignant. (Laughter.) 
Virtue is not wholly discrowned, while hypocrisy is the 



36 PROGRESS. 

homage laid at her feet. With such progress, why should 
we compromise ? 

Everybody allows — North and South — that any compro- 
mise will only be temporary relief. The South knows it is a 
lie, meant to tide over a shallow spot. The North knows it, 
too. The startled North, in fact, now says : " Yes, I'll con- 
tinue to serve you till my hair be grown, then I'll bring 
down the very temple itself." That is what a compromise 
really means. The progress is seen in this. The South 
always has said: "Yes, give me so much ; I will not keep 
my part of the bargain, but hold you to yours, and get more 
the moment I can." Hitherto the North has said yes, and 
her courage consisted in skulking. Seward would swear to 
support the Constitution, but not to keep the oath. I use 
his name to illustrate my idea. But it is always with the 
extremest reluctance I bring myself to see a spot on the 
fame of that man, who, at his own cost, by severe toil, brav- 
ing fierce odium, saved our civilization from the murder of 
the idiot Freeman. 

But you may also ask, if compromise be even a temporary 
relief, why not make it ? 

1st, Because it is wrong. 

2d, Because it is suicidal. Secession, appeased by com- 
promise, is only emboldened to secede again to-morrow, and 
/ thus get larger concessions. The cowardice that yields to 
threats invites them. 

3d, Because it delays emancipation. To-day, England, 
horror-struck that her five million operatives who live on 
cotton should depend on States rushing into anarchy, is ran- 
sacking the world for a supply. Leave her to toil under 
that lash, and in five years, South Carolina will be starved 
into virtue. One thousand slaves are born each day. Hurry 
emancipation three years, and you raise a million human be- 
ings into freeborn men. 

4th, Compromise demoralizes both parties. Mark ! the 
North, notwithstanding all its progress, does not now quit 
the South. In the great religious bodies and the State, it is 
the sinners who kick the virtuous out of the covenant with 
death! Mr. Dana, in his recent speech, does not secede be- 
cause unwilling to commit the three constitutional sins. The 
South secedes from him because he will not commit one 
more. 



J 



PROGRESS. 37 

5th, Compromise risks insurrection, the worst door at 
which freedom can enter. Let universal suffrage have free 
sway, and the ballot supersedes the bullet. But let an arro- 
gant and besotted minority curb the majority by tricks like 
these, and when you have compromised away Lincoln, you 
revive John Brown. On this point of insurrection, let me 
say a word. 

Strictly speaking, I repudiate the term " insurrection." 
The slaves are not a herd of vassals. They are a nation, 
four millions strong; having the same right of revolution 
that Hungary and Florence have. I acknowledge the right 
of two million and a half of white people in the seven seced- 
ing states to organize their government as they choose. 
Just as freely I acknowledge the right of four million of 
black people to organize their government, and to vindicate 
that right by arms. 

Men talk of the peace of the South under our present 
government. It is no real peace. With the whites, it 
is only that bastard peace which the lazy Roman loved, — 
ut se apricaret, — that he might sun himself. It is only safe 
idleness, sure breeder of mischief. With the slave, it is only 
war in disguise. Under that mask is hid a war keener in 
its pain,s, and deadlier in its effects, than any open fight. 
As the Latin adage runs, — mars gravior sub pace latet, — 
war bitterer for its disguise. 

Thirty years devoted to earnest use of moral means show 
how sincere our wish that this question should have a peace- 
ful solution. If your idols — your Websters, Clays, Cal- 
houns, Sewards, Adamses — had done their duty, so it 
would have been. Not ours the guilt of this storm, or of 
the future, however bloody. But I hesitate not to say that 
I prefer an insurrection which frees the slave in ten years 
to slavery for a century. A slave I pity. A rebellious 
slave I respect. I say now, as I said ten years ago, I do 
not shrink from the toast with which Dr. Johnson flavored 
his Oxford port, " Success to the first insurrection of the 
blacks in Jamaica!" I do not shrink from the sentiment 
of Southey, in a letter to Duppa, " There are scenes of tre- 
mendous horror which I could smile at by Mercy's side. 
An insurrection which should make the negroes masters of 
the West Indies is one." I believe both these sentiments 
are dictated by the highest humanity. I know what an- 
4 



38 PROGRESS. 

archy is. I know what civil war is. I can imagine the 
scenes of blood through which a rebellious slave population 
must march to their rights. They are dreadful. And yet, 
I do not know, that, to an enlightened mind, a scene of civil 
war is any more sickening than the thought of a hundred 
and fifty years of slavery. Take the broken hearts ; the 
bereaved mothers ; the infant, wrung from the hands of its 
parents ; the husband and wife torn asunder ; every right 
trodden under foot; the blighted hopes, the imbrutecl souls, 
the darkened and degraded millions, sunk below the level 
of intellectual life, melted in sensuality, herded with beasts, 
who have walked over the burning marl of Southern slav- 
ery to their graves ; and where is the battle-field, however 
ghastly, that is not white, — white as an angel's wing, — com- 
pared with the blackness of that darkness which has brooded 
over the Carolinas for two hundred years ? Do you love 
mercy ? Weigh out the fifty thousand hearts that have 
beaten their last pulse amid agonies of thought and suffer- 
ing fancy faints to think of; and the fifty thousand mothers, 
who, with sickening senses, watch for footsteps that fire not 
wont to tarry long in their coming, and soon find themselves 
left to tread the pathway of life alone ; add all the horrors 
of cities sacked and lands laid waste, — that is war, — weigh 
it now against some trembling young girl sent to the auction- 
block, some man, like that taken from our courthouse and 
carried back into Georgia ; multiply this individual agony 
into four millions ; multiply that into centuries ; and that into 
all the relations of father and child, husband and wife ; heap 
on all the deep, moral degradation both of the oppressor and 
the oppressed, and tell me if Waterloo or Thermopylae can 
claim one tear from the eye even of the tenderest spirit of 
mercy, compared with this daily system of hell amid the 
most civilized and Christian people on the face of the 
earth ! * 

* Macaulay makes the same comparison between a short civil war 
and long despotism — putting into Milton's mouth the following: 
" For civil war that it is an evil I dispute not. But that it is the 
greatest of evils, that I stoutly deny. It doth indeed appear to the 
misjudging to be a worse calamity than bad government, because its 
miseries are collected together within a short space and time, and may 
easily, at one view, be taken in and perceived. But the misfortunes 
of nations, ruled by tyrants, being distributed over many centuries 
and many places, as they are of greater weight and number, so they 
are of less display." 



PROGRESS. 39 

No, I confess I am not a non-resistant. The reason why 
I have advised the slave to be guided by a policy of peace 
is because he has had, hitherto, no chance. If he had one, 
if he had as good a chance as those who went up to Lexing- 
ton years ago, I should call him the basest recreant that ever 
deserted wife and child, if he did not vindicate his liberty , 
by his own right hand. 

Mr. Richard H. Dana, Jr., says in such a contest his sym- 
pathies would be with his own race * I confess mine would 
be with the right. I feel bound to add my doubt whether a 
slave insurrection would be a bloody one. In all revolu- 
tions, except the French, the people have always shown 
themselves merciful. Witness Switzerland, St. Domingo, 
Hungary, Italy. Tyranny sours more than suffering. The 
Conservative hates the Abolitionist more than we do him. 
The South hates the North. The master speaks ten bitter 
words of the slave where the slave speaks five of the master. 
Refuse all compromise — send the Slave States out to face 
the danger of which they are fully aware — announce 
frankly that we welcome the black race to liberty, won in 
battle, as cordially as we have done Kossuth and Garibaldi, 
and probably there will never be an insurrection. Prudent 
and masterly statesmanship will avert it by just concession. 
Thus Disunion is Peace as well as Liberty and Justice. 

But I was speaking of compromise. Compromise degrades 
us, and puts back freedom in Europe. If the North man- 
fully accepts the Potomac for her barrier, avows her glad- 

* The following is the paragraph in Mr. Dana's address, referred 
to by Mr. Phillips : — 

" An appeal to arms is a war of the races. They meet on the 
equality of the battle-field, and the victory goes to the strongest; and 
I confess that, when I consider what the white race is, and what the 
black race is, what civilization is, and what the white race is and 
always has been, and what the black race is and always has been, — 
and this doctrine of the races has impressed itself on my mind much 
more than before, from what I have seen of all races during the last 
year and a half,— I confess that, in a contest like that, my duty and 
my sympathies would go with my own race. I know it is a contest 
for freedom, but it is a contest for life and for freedom on both sides, 
because slavery is to end when vmr begins. One race is to go up, and 
one to go down. It is a question of extermination, or banishment, or 
subjugation, or all three. And I have not arrived at that degree of 
philanthropy that I desire to see the black race controlling all that 
vast country, and our own white civilized race driven out, subjugated, 
or exterminated. " 



/ 



40 PROGRESS. 

ness to get rid of tyrants, her willingness and her ability to 
stand alone, she can borrow as much money in Europe as 
before, and will be more respected. Free institutions are 
then proved breeders of men. If, instead of this, the North 
belittles herself by confessing her fears, her weakness, her 
preference for peace at any price, what capitalist will trust a 
rope of sand — a people which the conspiracy of Buchanan's 
Cabinet could not disgust, nor the guns of Carolina arouse ? 

"Will compromise eliminate all our Puritan blood — make 
the census add up against us and in favor of the South — 
write a new Testament — blot John Brown from history — 
make Connecticut suck its idle thumbs like a baby, and 
South Carolina invent and save like a Yankee? If it will, 
it will succeed. If it will not, Carolina don't want it any 
more than Jerrold's duck wants you to hold an umbrella 
over him in a hard shower. Carolina wants separation — 
wants, like the jealous son, her portion, and must waste it in 
riotous madness before she return a repentant prodigal. 

Why do I think disunion gain, peace, and virtue ? 

The Union, even if it be advantageous to all the States, 
is surely indispensable only to the South. 

Let us rise to the height of our position. This is revolu- 
tion, not rebellion. 

Suppose we welcome disunion, manfully avow our real 
sentiment, " liberty and equality," and draw the line at the 
Potomac. We do not want the Border States. Let them 
go, be welcome to the forts, take the Capitol with them. 
(Applause and hisses.) What to us is a hot-house city, 
empty streets, and useless marble ? Where Macgregor sits 
is the head of the table. Active brains, free lips, and cun- 
ning hands make empires. Paper Capitals are vain. Of 
course, we must assume a right to buy out Maryland and 
Delaware. Then, by running our line at the Potomac, we 
close the irrepressible conflict, and have homogeneous insti- 
tutions. Then we part friends. The Union thus ended, the 
South no longer hates the North. Cuba she cannot have. 
France^ England, and ourselves forbid. If she spread over 
Central America, that will bring no cause of war to a North- 
ern confederacy. We are no filibusters. Her nearness to 
us there cannot harm us. Let Kansas witness that while 
Union fettered her, and our national banner clung to the 
flag-staff heavy with blood, we still made good George Can- 



PROGRESS. 41 

ning's boast, " Where that banner is planted, foreign domin- 
ion shall not come." With a government heartily on his 
side, and that flag floating in the blessings of twenty million 
of freemen, the loneliest settler in the shadow of the Rocky 
Mountains will sleep fearless. 

Why, then, should there not be peace between two such *' 
confederacies? There must be. Let me show you why: — 
1st, The laws of trade will bind us together as they now 
do all other lands. This side of the ocean, at least, we are " 
not living in feudal times, when princes made war for ambi- 
tion. We live in clays when men of common sense go about 
their daily business, while frightened kings are flying along 
the highways. Leave neighborhood and trade alone to 
work their usual results, and we shall be at peace. Observe, 
only Northerners are lynched at the South now. Span- 
iards, French, Scotch are safe. When English Captain 
Vaughan is tarred and feathered, the mayor offers a reward, 
and the grand jury indict. After a fair, sensible disunion, 
such as I have described, a Boston man will be as well off 
as Captain Vaughan. Fair Treaties are better security 
than sham Constitutions. 

At any rate, disunion could not make the two sections 
any more at war than they are now. Any change in this 
respect would be an improvement. If the North and Mex- 
ico had touched boundaries, would they ever have quar- 
relled? Nothing but Southern fillibusterism, which can 
never point North, ever embroiled us with Mexico. To us 
in future the South will be another Mexico ; we shall not 
wish to attack her ; she will be too weak, too intent on her 
own broils, to attack us. 

Even if the Border States do not secede, let us, for the 
slave's sake, welcome the schism between them and the 
Gulf States, which that very difference of conduct will be 
sure to cause. A house divided against itself cannot stand. 
Only twenty-three out of every hundred inhabitants are 
. slaves in the Border States — twenty-three slaves to seventy- 
seven freemen. Fear of loss by fugitives, dread of danger 
to a hated institution, thus weak in proportion to Northern 
enemies, will urge slaveholders to push their slaves South- 
ward. Another census may find the Border States with 
only ten or fifteen slaves out of one hundred inhabitants — 
ten slaves to ninety freemen. Reduced to such compass 
4* 



42 PROGRESS. 

slaver)' is manageable ; we shall soon see plans of emanci- 
pation, compensation, and freedom. On the contrary, the 
Gulf States now have forty-six slaves in every hundred in- 
habitants — forty-six slaves to fifty-four freemen. Strength- 
ened by this tendency of the slave population Southward, 
and the opening of the slave-trade, we may soon see the 
black race a majority, and either as a nation of mixed races, 
or as black republics, the Gulf States will gravitate back to 
us free. 

The South cannot make war on any one. Suppose the 
fifteen States hang together a year, — which is almost an 
impossibility, — 1st, they have given bonds in two thousand 
million of dollars — the value of their slaves — to keep the 
peace. 

2d, They will have enough to do to attend to the irrepres- 
sible conflict at home. Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, will 
be their Massachusetts ; Winter Davis, Blair, and Cassius 
Clay, their Seward and Garrison. 

3d, The Gulf States will monopolize all the offices. A 
man must have Gulf principles to belong to a healthy party. 
Under such a lead, disfranchised Virginia, in opposition, 
will not have much heart to attack Pennsylvania. 

4th, The census shows that the Border States are push- 
ing their slaves south. Fear of their free Northern neigh- 
bors will quicken the process, and so widen the breach be- 
tween Gulf and Border States by making one constantly 
more and the other less Slave States. Free trade in sugar 
bankrupts Louisiana. Free trade in men bankrupts Virginia. 
Free trade generally lets two-thirds of the direct taxation 
rest on the numerous, richer, and more comfortable whites 
of the Border States ; hence further conflict. Such a des- 
potism, with every third man black and a foe, will make no 
wars. 

Why should it attack us ? We are not a cannon thun- 
dering at its gates. We are not an avalanche overhanging 
its sunny vales. Our influence, that of freedom, is only the 
air, penetrating everywhere ; like heat, permeating all space. 
The South cannot stand isolated on a glass cricket. The 
sun will heat her, and electricity convulse. She must out- 
wit t.hem before she can get rid of ideas. A fevered child 
in July might as well strike at the sun, as the South attack 



PROGRESS. 43 

us for that, the only annoyance we can give her, — the sight 
and influence of our nobler civilization. 

Disunion is gain. I venture the assertion, in the face of 
State Street, that of any five Northern men engaged in 
Southern trade exclusively, four will end in bankruptcy. 
If disunion sifts such commerce, the North will lose nothing. 

I venture the assertion, that seven at least of the South- 
ern States receive from the government more than they con- 
tribute to it. So far, their place will be more profitable than 
their company. 

The whole matter of the Southern trade has been grossly 
exaggerated, as well as the importance of the Mississippi 
River. Freedom makes her own rivers of iron. Facts show 
that for one dollar the West sends or brings by the river, 
she sends and brings four to and from the East by wagon 
and rail. 

If, then, Mississippi and Louisiana bar the river with forts, 
they will graciously be allowed to pay for them, while North- 
ern railroads grow rich carrying behind steam that por- 
tion of wheat, bacon, silk, or tea, which would otherwise float 
lazily up and down that yellow stream. 

The Cincinnati Press, which has treated this subject with 
rare ability, asserts that, excepting provisions which the 
South must, in any event, buy of the West, the trade of 
Cincinnati with Southern Indiana alone is thrice her trade 
with the whole South. As our benevolent societies get 
about one dollar in seven south of Mason and Dixon's line, 
so our traders sell there only about one dollar in five. Such 
trade, if cut off, would ruin nobody. In fact, the South buys 
little of us, and pays only for about half she buys. (Laugh- 
ter and hisses.) 

Now Ave build Southern roads, pay Southern patrol, carry 
Southern letters, support, out of the nation's treasures, an 
army of Southern office-holders, waste more money at Nor- 
folk in building ships that will not float, than is spent in pro- 
tecting the five great lakes, which bear up millions of com- 
merce. These vast pensions come back to us in shape of 
Southern traders, paying, on the average, one-half their 
debts. Dissolve the Union, and we shall save this outgo, 
and probably not sell without a prospect of being paid. 
While the laws of trade guarantee that even if there be two 
nations, we shall have their carrying trade and manufacture 



y 



/ 



44 PROGRESS. 

for them just so long as we carry and manufacture cheaper 
than other men. 

Southern trade is a lottery, to which the Union gives all 
the prizes. Put it on a sound basis by disunion, and the 
North gains. If we part Avithout anger, the South buys, as 
every one does, of the cheapest seller. We get her honest 
business, without being called to fill up the gap of bank- 
ruptcy which the wasteful system of slave-labor must occa- 
sion. In this generation, no Slave State in the Union has 
made the year's ends meet. In counting the wealth of the 
Union, such States are a minus quantity. Should the Gulf 
States, however, return, I have no doubt the United States 
treasury will be called on to pay all these secession debts. 

Disunion is honor. I will not count up all the bankrupt 
statesmen — blighted names — skeletons marking the sad 
path of the caravan over our desert of seventy years — they 
are too familiar. As years roll on, history metes out justice. 
But take the last instance — take Mr. Richard H. Dana, Jr., as 
example, a name historic for generations, a scholar of world- 
wide fame. He finds in the Constitution the duty of return- 
ing fugitive slaves, all alike, "the old and the ignorant, the 
young and the beautiful," to be surrendered to the master, 
whether he be man or brute. Mr. Dana avows his full 
readiness to perform this legal duty. All honor at least to 
the shameless effrontery with which he avows his willing- 
ness. Most of our public men, like the English Tories of 
1689, are "ashamed to name what they are not ashamed to 
do." He paints the hell of slavery in words that make the 
blood cold, and then boasts, this Massachusetts scholar — 
gentleman, his friends would call him — boasts that no man 
can charge him with having ever said one word against the 
surrender of fugitive slaves! Counsel in all the Boston 
slave cases, he " never suffered himself to utter one word 
which any poor fugitive negro, or any friend of his, could 
construe into an assertion that a fugitive slave should not be 
restored ! " 

He utiblushingly claims merit for himself and Massachu- 
setts — I doubt if, in the scornful South, he will have 
"his claim allowed" — that he and Massachusetts have 
constantly executed laws which "offended their sense of 
honor, and ran counter to their moral sentiments," which he 
considers a " painful duty" To be sure, Mr. Dana has dis- 



progress. 4a 

covered in his wide travels and extensive voyages a u pecul- 
iar" class of people, narrow-minded, very little read in 
Greek, who think, poor simpletons, that this slave-hunting 
is a sin. But then, Aristotle did not look at things in this 
light. He took broader views, and proves conclusively that 
three virtues and one sin exactly make a saint, and Mr. 
Dana is too good a churchman to dispute with Aristotle. 
He sees no reason why, notwithstanding this clause as to 
forcing our fellow-men back into hell, " a conscientious man" 
should not swear to obey the Constitution, and actually obey 
it. Now Mr. Seward and Mr. Joel Parker, who both be- 
lieve in the fugitive slave clause, and willingly swear to en- 
force it, have each given public notice they will not enforce 
it. Mr. Dana will swear, and perform too. They will 
swear, but not perform. Their guilt is perjury ; his is man- 
stealing. On the whole, I should rather be Seward than 
Dana; for perjury is the more gentlemanly vice, to my 
thinking. Perjury only niches your neighbor's rights. 
Man-stealing takes rights and neighbor too. 

After all this, Mr. Dana objects to the Crittenden com- 
promise. Something short of that he can allow, because he 
does not call these Other offers, Adams' and such like, " com- 
promises " ! It seems he objects more to the word than the 
thing. But the Crittenden proposal he is set against for a 
reason which may strike you singular in a man willing to 
return slaves ; but then we are bundles of inconsistencies, 
all of us. But this slave-hunter canuot abide Crittenden 
because, listen ! because he thinks " an investment in dis- 
honor is a bad investment ! An investment in infidelity to 
the principles of liberty is a bad investment!" Hunt 
slaves? Yes, it is a duty. Give some territory to slavery, 
and peril the Republican party ? Never, it is a " bad in- 
vestment ! " De Quincey says : " If once a man indulges in 
murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing ; from 
robbing he comes next to drinking, and from that to ill man- 
ners and procrastination. Once enter this downward path, 
and you know not where you'll stop." Mr. Dana has, how- 
ever, taken warning, and stops at man-stealing. 

Some of you will call this personality. I will tell you 
some time, when the hour serves, why I use personality. 
Enough now to remind you his clients are wealth, culture, 
powei^ and white blood. Mine are four million of human 



46 PROGRESS. 

beings, standing dumb suppliants on the threshold of 
Christianity and civilization, and hundreds of fugitives trem- 
bling at every motion of the door-latch. Whoever perils 
their safety, or holds back the day of their redemption by 
ingenious sophistry, base word, or base act, shall always find 
in me a critic. Let no man call me harsh ; I only repeat 
with emphasis words such men are not ashamed to speak. 
Southern Legrees can plead, if not excuse, yet some exten- 
uation. But when a Massachusetts Republican, a Massa- 
chusetts lawyer, a Massachusetts scholar avows such senti- 
ments, he puts himself below the Legrees. Blame not this 
plainness of speech. I have a hundred friends, as brave 
souls as God ever made, whose hearths are not as safe after 
honored men make such speeches. 

Faneuil Hall, too, kneels patient for its burden, and by 
its president that meeting says to the South, " Only name 
your terms, that is all we will trouble you to do." Like 
Luther's priest, who, when Catholics told him to pray one 
way and Protestants another, ended by repeating the alpha- 
bet, and begging God to frame a prayer agreeable to him- 
self, so our Boston orator offers the South carte blanche, the 
whole bundle of compromises ; " will she only condescend 
to indicate her preference?" 

Mr. Dana is a man above the temptations of politics. 
The president of the Faneuil Hall meeting has no political 
aspirations, an independent gentleman. Such speeches show 
how wide the gangrene of the Union spreads. Mr. Dana's 
speech was made, he says, in the shadow of Bunker's Hill, 
in sight of the spot where Washington first drew his sword. 
The other speech was borne to the roof of Faneuil Hall by 
the plaudits of a thousand merchants. Surely, such were 
not the messages Cambridge and our old Hall used to ex- 
change ! Can you not hear Warren and Otis crying to their 
recreant representatives : " Sons, scorn to be slaves ! Be- 
lieve, for our sakes, we did not fight for such a government. 
Trample it under foot. You cannot be poorer than we were. 
It cannot cost you more than our seven years of war. Do 
it, if only to show that we have not lived in vain." 



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